Today is Interview Day. In a matter of hours, you’ll meet with three candidates – all with promising resumes – for a top sales position. The problem is, you’re wearing your Sales Hiring Goggles again – and even worse, you don’t know you have them on.Much like the equally bewildering rose-colored glasses, your Sales Hiring Goggles are altering your hiring decisions – decisions that are based on emotion, instead of fact. Your Sales Hiring Goggles cloud your opinions of the sales reps you hire – and they may lead you to make the wrong assessment about who will be successful in the sales role over the long-term.

The term “Sales Hiring Goggles” is fun, but its basis is rooted in neuroscience, the scientific study of the nervous system, which includes the brain. Just why does your brain process decisions about your candidates on an unconscious, emotional level? Let’s take a closer look at the preferences you don’t realize you have.

The Neuroscience Behind Emotion and Preference Decision-making is relatively illogical, because it’s emotional. In fact, it’s estimated that 90 percent of the decisions we make are based on unconscious emotion, and to boot, we process emotions a whopping 400 times faster than our intellect. It’s more than easy to make a decision based on first appearances – it’s human nature.

In TheNeuroscience of Emotions, David Franks, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, discusses his findings about our unconscious preferences and emotional leanings. They exert significantly more influence over our thoughts and behaviors than our conscious preferences, and because we cannot exert control over preferences we aren’t even aware of, all hiring managers will have a hard time ensuring that their impressions of a candidate are rooted in unbiased fact.Unbeknownst to us, we tend to prefer people, experiences, and situations that are familiar. Embarrassingly enough, you may unconsciously prefer the first sales candidate who comes in today because she sounded like your helpful, kind, 10th grade English teacher. The energetic interviewee with the undiscovered, unmatched resiliency and competitiveness was too reminiscent of your annoying brother – so he’s not getting the job.

You may be sweating at this point, wondering if the candidate that you failed to hire six months ago – who now works at the competitor down the road – was someone you should have picked up. While you can’t change what you didn’t know in the past, you can start fresh today, ensuring that your sales professionals from here on out are assessed in an unbiased fashion from the outset of the hiring process, so you can make the right decisions – and quickly weed out who doesn’t have the right sales profile.

Making Unbiased, Successful Decisions in the Hiring Process In order to shield yourself and your sales candidates from biased decision-making during the hiring process, you need a data-driven, unbiased assessment at the start – not in the middle – of the review process, so your Sales Hiring Goggles never have the chance to fool you.

It’s a forced step back in a process that needs an unbiased opinion, allowing you to keep your sales rep candidates at arm’s length so you can determine their viability for the role before the warm and fuzzy feelings even have a chance to set in. With this kind of “gatekeeper” in the process, you’ll ensure that facts – not feelings – are in charge of who is chosen to be your team’s next top sales performer.

Resumes are written to sell you – and it’s likely that a candidate with a sales background can do just that. Studies show that up to 78 percent of resumes contain lies – and with your unbecoming Sales Hiring Goggles on, too – there’s little chance that you’re starting with the truth.

Assessments grounded in science and logic, instead of emotion, like Sales Hunter DNA, are becoming the viable solution for identifying the critical success factors that are a part of each and every premier sales hunter’s profile. It’s a profile of resiliency, competitiveness, and self-awareness, qualities determined through years of research, that every great sales candidate possesses, allowing hiring managers to determine who’s a good fit before reading the resume or meeting in person.

Don’t let your sales candidate’s first and only sale be their unsuccessful hire. Schedule a demo of Sales Hunter DNA today.